Jc. French et Cl. Viles, ENSURING RETRIEVAL EFFECTIVENESS IN DISTRIBUTED DIGITAL LIBRARIES, Journal of visual communication and image representation, 7(1), 1996, pp. 61-73
We find that dissemination of collection-wide information (CWI) in a d
istributed collection of documents is needed to achieve retrieval effe
ctiveness comparable to that of a centralized collection. Complete dis
semination is unnecessary, The required dissemination level depends up
on the content-skew of the distributed collection, i.e., how documents
are allocated among sites, Low dissemination is needed for random doc
ument allocation, but higher levels are needed when documents are allo
cated on the basis of their content. We define parameters to control d
issemination and document allocation and present results from four doc
ument collections, These results provide insight into the necessary te
chnology underlying digital libraries. We also describe the architectu
re of the Networked Computer Science Technical Report Library (NCSTRL)
, a concrete example of a system that fits our model of a distributed
archive. (C) 1996 Academic Press,Inc.